Guest Checkout not showing for certain countries

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We have received in the past months e-mails from European customers (Germany, Denmark, etc) claiming that the guest checkout option (bank card only) is not available. Many business customers do not want to create a Paypal account to pay for their products, therefore the transaction gets canceled and we are forced to process manual payments via Bank transfer.

It seems that Paypal is not wanting to take the risk of guest payments, like other card processing firms. This is an issue for our webstore and we are considering replacing Paypal with another payment gateway.

Any similar experience?

[archigrafix]

I have been in touch with the customer service after doing some testing. I have concluded that depending on the country selected in the Paypal payment page there would be required or not to register as a Paypal user. For most European Union countries, there was the requirement to register. For Norway, in other hand, there was no requirement to register as a Paypal user.

The customer support confirmed that is the behaviour that the artificial intelligence system enforces to prevent fraud.  There was nothing that Paypal could do to allow guest checkout for European Union countries. I was invited by Paypal to use another payment gateway as alternative for those situations.

It is rather bizarre that the solution offered by Paypal is to use someone else services to have a bank card payment on a webstore.